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- Hacker News
- I've repeatedly said this almost year after year, but Servo is not a "real" project. It's weird, but whatever the case is, after it left Mozilla, it has clearly oriented around being governance focused and not helping actual embedded browser engineers.
You don't have to believe me, just look at their track record and ask yourself why no one embeds it in anything after, what, a decade or more?
by bellowsgulch - Because webdevs are lazy and Electron works?by GoblinSlayer
- Near the end of each month, I get super excited for these blogs. Congrats on another release!by vyaa
- Does anyone actually use Servo for anything?by 9cb14c1ec0
- Servo has always been a purely reasearch project with no intention to be ever used in production.by Xirdus
- Not really. There's a parallel thread on the front page where everybody's talking about writing a browser engine in anything other than Rust is irresponsible, and ridiculous. And yet, no one's rushing to pick up Servo. There seem to be some projects in GTK and QT to embed it, but other than a handful of pretty niche browsers, doesn't seem like there's much use.by rpdillon
- I've got a stripped down installation of win11 in a vm that has Servo as its only browser if there's ever a need to open a website in it. It's something!by Permik
- I played around with it as a replacement for embedded WebKit in a desktop app. It's getting there!
It's obviously not ready yet, but it's also not "infinitely far" anymore. I'm donating to them, because I think that they're the only realistic successor to the dying Firefox.
by cyberax - Maybe give them a second? Yes, it's usable for applications web views if you're willing to restrict yourself but for general purpose web browsing there's still a lot that needs doing (but work is progressing). Under Google's management, web tech has grown fast. And it's an ever shifting living standard. There is a lot for any alternative browser engine to implement, let alone keep pace with the changes.by ChrisSD
- What exactly are the curmudgeons in this thread getting out of this?
- They are going to do all this work and then adopt the wrong tech or try and make money in the wrong way and end up with their only viable userbase constantly eternally talking them.by Fizz43
- The last few times I've tried to build Servo it's failed for me. (It's also one the very few rust projects that have ever failed to build for me).by bobajeff
- On a Linux system or something else? Iirc a proper build uses spider money which is hell to build/embed.by minraws
- Wonder how long it will take before they can render PDFjs? That is a hard target admittedly.by int0x29
- There are more important things to work on like that overengineered bloatware regex.by GoblinSlayer
- The very first link in the post is broken. The correct link is:-
https://github.com/servo/servo/releases/tag/0.4.0
Prior releases included a preceding 'v' in the version but not this one for some reason.
by chaz6 - Congrats on the new release. Anything that creates more competition in the browser space has my support. I was hyped about Ladybird but their recent adoption of LLMs and going source-available only has put a bit of a dent in it.by Fervicus
- It's just a pause until they get to their alpha deadline. Hard to do that when you can't quickly validate all the drive by llm contributionsby kingwill101
- I think you mean that the Ladybird project doesn't accept outside contributions anymore but it's still open source (just checked it's under BSD 2-Clause License). Pretty important distinction I think.by bobajeff